Game cancellations, culture clashes, and a "good enough to ship" mentality— …

Andrew Hume was a game developer working on Sega Soccer Slam for smallish developer Black Box Studio, and he loved it—for a while.

"Life in a small independent studio was pretty much perfect," he told me. "I was working with happy and talented industry veterans." Hume knew he was green, but he enjoyed the work and how much he was learning. He whistled on the way to the office. "That ended, though," he said.

Black Box was enjoying success and at that point had over 100 employees. The studio seemed on the cusp of great things and the major publishers took notice. EA purchased the company. "The culture was not destroyed overnight, but the place went from a frat house to an obvious place of cold business," Hume said. Many people left the company and new employees were brought over from EA. Hume felt like "a cog in the machine" and grew so disillusioned by the job he quit suddenly one day, without anything to fall back on.

Sega Soccer Slam was a title from Black Box Games, which was later purchased by EA

After working on another digital project and then running out of money, he had to find more work, so he returned to the world of small developers. He was eventually hired at Radical Entertainment. "It was a large but independent company with talented industry vets, free food, beer on tap... I was happy again," he said.

Two weeks later, Vivendi Universal purchased Radical, but its culture remained intact. Hume had braced for impact and was ready to leave, but he gradually relaxed and once again enjoyed his new home.

A few years later, Activision merged with Vivendi Universal. "Things did change this time," Hume said. He had been working on Scarface 2 for two years and was happy with the work. "Scarface 2 was shaping up to be awesome, the team was behind it, we were all feeling like this was going to be the best game we ever made," he said. Activision killed the project.

Hume began working with Richard Clifford at Radical on another big-name game—they both declined to say which one—and after a year of hard work, that project was cancelled as well.

"Having years of your life flushed because of a graph projection and watching 60 of your friends get laid off can destroy the magic feeling," Clifford said. He and Hume both left Radical to create MinMax games and have just released their first game, Space Pirates and Zombies.

Space Pirates and Zombies is a top-down, space action game with heavy RPG elements.

People go into the business of making video games because they're passionate. Hours are long, competition is fierce, and pay can be low. Still, if you work hard enough, one day you can get a job working for one of your favorite companies making your favorite games. Or at least that's the dream.

But increasingly, the thought of working for yet another studio has become stifling for many professional developers. The gaming industry used to rely on developers learning to create games on their own before they would get hired, but the situation is now reversed: developers increasingly spend a few years inside studios and publishers to gain experience, then drop out of the system to make their own independent games.

The main reason is simple: big-name games have never offered less job security, and with the rise of digital distribution, devs who want to sate their hunger for something more than just another wargame have viable ways to sell their own dream projects.

Why "successful" developers burn out

Audrey Leprince is in charge of operations at the Game Bakers, an independent developer of mobile games. She has extensive experience in the video game industry, most notably as the producer of Tom Clancy's Endwar. She speaks highly of that project, including the experience she gained working on a team with so many nationalities.

"Working for a major publisher can be rewarding, very quickly: you get to work on known IPs, you have job security, you get a good paycheck every month, you have the business card with the big name on it to show off to your friends," she told me.

That environment has major downsides, too. "You don't really know how much you will be listened to or if your ideas will be taken into account, how much freedom you'll have in your work, or if you'll end up crunching on a B project after the perfect project you joined for gets cancelled," she said.

That's how Eric Thoa, who is in charge of the creative content for the Game Bakers, decided to leave Ubisoft. "I would love to say 'I just wanted to live my dreams and that gave me the guts to leave behind my career with a major publisher,'" he said. "Well, that's actually the truth, but also the game I was working on got cancelled after two years of development. That was the nudge I needed."

It was no small move for Thoa, as he had spent the years between 2005 and 2009 traveling the world to work on different projects for Ubisoft's varied studios and shipping a number of games. A large publisher gave him the skills needed to do his job well, even as it gave him the motivation to leave the company.

The Game Bakers is currently working on Squids, which they describe as Angry Birds meets Worms, with RPG elements. "For the universe, Audrey and I share a passion for cephalopods of all sorts, and that was a perfect match with the controls I had in mind," Thoa said.

This is the joy of independent development: a shared love of cephalopods is a viable jumping-off point for a new project.

Good enough to ship

I once spoke to someone who had an incredibly unsexy job working on a game that was simply pushed out with no marketing budget. When I told him that copies of the game went out to press days after it was released to retail, he made a disgusted sound in the back of his throat. The game was wonderful, but it was given zero chance of success from the publisher. This was a guy who was making little money working on a game he believe in and loved, only to see it die an ugly death because someone didn't think it made financial sense to support. He was also drinking heavily, his eyes wet with anger and frustration as we talked about what had happened.

It's a story I've heard repeatedly when talking to game developers: studios get swallowed, games get canned, you're moved from a game you love to working on a licensed project and all your enthusiasm for your job is sapped away. I've heard horror stories about project leads who say that their games don't need to be fun, just "good enough to ship" in order to to meet a movie's release date or the launch of a children's television show.

The press talks to happy project leads and marketing people when a publisher wants to hype a new game, but when you meet someone who simply works on games in a bar at a show like E3 or the Game Developers Conference, you begin to see what it can be like for the rank and file.

When you're trying to attract passionate, creative professionals to create games, this whole approach becomes a liability. "Even the best of the best AAA studios are not safe these days. A lot of games get cancelled now, or don't make the expected income," Hume explained. "When this happens, 100 or so friends are shown the door, despite how much they have done in the past. I won't mention any specific titles here, but you read about it happening every other week or so."

That's not to say there aren't good studios out there, or people in the business who know the value of their developers. But there's a reason we write about these places like they're news.